Subhas Chandra Bose In Nazi Germany: Politics, Intelligence, and Propaganda 1941-43 (Columbia/Hurst) - Hardcover

Hayes, Romain

3.59

44 ratings by Goodreads

9780231702348: Subhas Chandra Bose In Nazi Germany: Politics, Intelligence, and Propaganda 1941-43 (Columbia/Hurst)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0231702345 ISBN 13: 9780231702348

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 2011

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On April 3, 1941, a man claiming to be an Italian diplomat arrived in Berlin, demanding to meet with Ernst Woermann, Germany's undersecretary of state. Woermann listened carefully to the man's plans, which sought to create a government in exile and launch a military strike against a shared enemy. The government the diplomat planned would be Indian, and the target would be British India. "Orlando Mazzotta" was in fact Subhas Chandra Bose, an Indian leftist radical nationalist and former president of the Indian National Congress. Just a few months earlier Bose had escaped from Calcutta with the help of German and Italian officials. One of India's national icons, practically on par with Gandhi, Bose eventually became a hero of the anticolonial resistance, establishing the Indian National Army and recruiting thousands to fight imperial power.

Despite the strategic benefits of partnering with Bose, the Nazis did not know what to do with him, and the rebel's irrepressible radicalism only further complicated their overlapping aims. Very little has been published on Bose's activities in Nazi Germany and his overtures to fascist regimes. Romain Hayes is the first to focus exclusively on Bose's interactions with Nazi Germany during the Second World War, making extensive use of German, Indian, and British sources, including memoranda, notes, minutes, reports, telegrams, letters, and broadcasts. He also draws on rare materials from recently released German archives. Hayes ultimately reveals lesser known aspects of Nazi foreign policy and challenges Ghandi-centric portrayals of the Indian independence movement.

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About the Author:

Romain Hayes is a freelance writer. This is his first book.

Review:

Subhas Chandra Bose In Nazi Germany is a thoughtful narrative of the actions and words of Bose during his war years in Germany. Romain Hayes sets out a valuable description and follows the evidence very closely.

(Michael H. Fisher, Oberlin College, author of The Inordinately Strange Life of Dyce Sombre: Victorian Anglo Indian MP and Chancery "Lunatic")

Egotistical, autocratic, hubristic, Subhas Chandra Bose was an ambivalent yet also widely admired figure; a tragic hero who stood on the wrong side of history. This book is a nuanced elucidation of a complex national leader both impressive and infuriating. Romain Hayes effectively evokes the subtleties of Bose's relation with the Congress Party and the masses of his fellow Indians. A highly original, erudite, and scholarly work based on intensive new research and sources. It represents a lucid contribution to our understanding of India's independence movement and its relationship to the global conflict of nations within which it struggled to make its voice heard, and to the massive propaganda fight engaged in with frenzy by all the Second World War's warring parties.

(Nicholas O'Shaughnessy, University of London, author of Politics and Propaganda: Weapons of Mass Seduction)

As the only Indian to lead a military assault against the British empire in the twentieth century, Subhas Chandra Bose is an important figure interrupting the conventional narrative of India's nonviolent resistance against colonialism. Yet the fact that Bose fought Britain with German and Japanese help during the Second World War has led to his efforts being glossed over, downplayed, or dismissed merely as an example of collaboration with fascism. This book's great achievement is to demonstrate that Bose's relations with the Nazis were far more complex than has generally been thought, and in doing so it allows us to see both German diplomacy and Indian nationalism in a new light. Rather than dealing with imperialism as a side issue in the war, Hayes shows that it was an integral part of a great conflict often seen only as a battle between freedom and tyranny.

(Faisal Devji, University of Oxford, author of The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics)

Hayes has put together a lucid exposition of this difficult subject with the available German documentation, interviews with contemporary witnesses, British documents, and Indian sources on Bose...the author has woven the existing material on Bose in a concise and revealing narrative.

(Jaideep Prabhu H-War)

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